ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic understanding has a distinctive contribution to make to our understanding about individual, group and social processes. Over the course of its development, its intense focus on the depth and richness of the human psyche has given it a unique position in the human sciences. In part this results from many of its ideas coming principally from clinical work with patients and in part from the fact that it has never avoided confronting some of the darker, more disturbing and even sinister aspects of human emotion and behaviour. But maybe above all, it has almost exclusively relied in its approach to providing therapy on the essence of what it is to be human – people communicating with each other through ongoing relationships that have meaning, are structured, provide consistency and are relatively long lasting. In particular, it has developed a powerful perspective on the impact that people have on each other, often unknowingly, through the concept of transference and countertransference. Its focus on the importance of understanding through refl ective consideration of the emotional content of what is inside the therapist and what is inside the child or adolescent in interaction makes it distinct. This explanatory and relational perspective is central to bringing about change and drives the power of its therapeutic endeavour. However, many of these principles, indeed the psychoanalytic approach to therapeutic interventions, do not sit easily in the modern world’s demand for quick – if not instant – solutions to human problems. With the demand for evidence-based, low-cost and low-skill interventions, psychoanalytic psychotherapy sits uneasily in the modern world of child and adolescent mental health. However, whatever challenges it faces, it has never been static and recent explorations of some of the links between its fundamental concepts of the structure of emotional processes, attachment theory and neuroscience (Fonagy, 2001; Fonagy et al., 2002; Siegel, 1999) have been reaffi rming and continue to deepen its knowledge base.
